Haunting Image of War: A Dead Woman's Dentures in the Dirt

"I told you, 'Don’t go out, they’ll kill you,’ " one daughter cried out. "I told you, my lovely mother, 'Don’t go out, they’ll kill you.’ "

Greg Mitchell, E&P

Two days ago, The New York Times published a plain color photograph of a set of dentures, the eleven white teeth set off by the pink plastic. You don’t expect to see a row of false teeth in the International section of the Times – or anywhere else there – but there they were, right at the top of page A10. This part seemed especially odd: They were resting on the ground next to some pebbles. What’s this all about? Returning to the front page, anyone who overlooked the accompanying story at first – its headline was rather too typical, "Iraqi Widow Saves Her Home, but Victory is Brief" – might discover that the dentures were just about all that was left behind when the widow in question was carted off to the morgue last Wednesday in Baghdad, after she "was shot dead while walking by a bakery in the local market." Also left at the scene: a bullet casing and a pool of her blood. The false teeth, it turns out, were uppers. And so began one of the most haunting and important stories, with pictures, of the entire war: an up-close look at what can only be called ethnic cleansing. But my question today is: Where are the fallen dentures in the online version of the story? The Web article is accompanied by a slide show, which includes all of the remarkable pictures that ran with the Friday piece, plus two others, but absent one: the dentures shot...

continua / continued

Iraqi Widow Saves Her Home, but Victory Is Brief

The next morning, Ms. Saadoun was shot dead while walking by a bakery in the local market.

After the police took the body away, all that remained in the alleyway was a pool of blood, a bullet casing and the upper half of Ms. Saadoun’s set of false teeth.